Meaning & use
hapax legomenon
Last updated
Meanings
nouncountabletechnicalspecialist
A word or form that occurs only once in a written work, an author's writings or a whole body of texts.
Grammar: Countable with an irregular plural: hapax legomena.
Patterns
- a hapax legomenon in something
The word appears only once in the manuscript, so scholars call it a hapax legomenon.
Translators struggle with a hapax legomenon because no other context explains it.
Shakespeare's works contain hundreds of hapax legomena.
nouncountablerarefigurative
By extension, any unique thing or event that occurs only once.
Grammar: Rare and figurative: used by writers who enjoy learned vocabulary.
Patterns
- something is a hapax legomenon
The strange festival was a historical hapax legomenon, never recorded again.
Her dazzling performance felt like a hapax legomenon in his career.
Word forms
| plural | hapax legomena |
|---|
Common combinations
- a biblical hapax legomenon
- The word is a biblical hapax legomenon, found in one verse only.
- hapax legomena in a corpus
- Hapax legomena make up about half the words in a large corpus.
- identify a hapax legomenon
- The researcher identified a hapax legomenon in the inscription.
- translate a hapax legomenon
- It is hard to translate a hapax legomenon accurately.
Synonyms and how they differ
- nonce word
- A nonce word is made up for one occasion and may be heard more than once in practice, while a hapax legomenon is defined by appearing only once in a text.
- unique occurrence
- Unique occurrence is a plain phrase for anything happening once, and lacks the linguistic precision of hapax legomenon.
Word family
- hapax noun
- short for hapax legomenon in informal scholarly use
- legomena noun
- the plural second element of hapax legomena
- dis legomenon noun
- a word occurring only twice in a body of text
Commonly confused: hapax legomenon or neologism?
hapax legomenon vs neologism
A neologism is a newly invented word; a hapax legomenon may be very old, but it appears only once in the surviving texts.
Practice
A scholar finds a word that appears exactly once in all of an ancient author's surviving writings. What is it called?
Choose one answer.
A hapax legomenon is a word attested once only. A neologism is a new coinage, which is tempting but does not require appearing only once.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “hapax legomenon”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.